A cogent, persuasive, and timely look at the dollar’s power.
An authoritative work offers a perspective on the United States dollar’s importance on the global stage.
This is economist/scholar Elson’s fifth book on global finance, distinguished by its narrower focus on the role that the dollar plays in the international economy. The author first covers the historical rise of the dollar since World War II, then demonstrates how it became the center of the global financial system. He finally addresses the benefits and defects of the dollar-centered system as well as possible reforms. Elson’s depth of knowledge on the subject is the basis for a solidly factual, if at times wonky, discussion. Still, even readers not steeped in global economics will surely comprehend the influence and implications of the “dollar zone,” which “has increased to around 65% of global GDP, involving more than half of the 195 countries in the global system with separate currencies.” The author shows how the U.S. routinely exerts its financial power internationally. But the more intriguing aspect of the book is the contrast of the dollar system’s benefits with its deficiencies. In particular, he exposes a number of weaknesses that intensify risk; for example, with the American economy becoming a smaller part of the global financial landscape in the past decade, it may “be unable to continue to satisfy a growing demand for safe assets without other countries becoming concerned about the debt sustainability of the United States.” Further complicating the vaunted current position of the dollar is, not surprisingly, the increasing power of the Chinese economy. Observers and students of the global economy are likely to find the chapter on “possible reforms” of the dollar-based system to be of great value. Here, Elson suggests that a shift to a multireserve currency system may be appropriate, although an “unbalanced and gradual process of evolution” in that direction “could be the source of financial instability.” Another key concern the author raises is the role of digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and, more specifically, the potential for central bank digital currencies. Each chapter contains notes and references, and Elson’s concluding chapter is a fine summary of the book’s main points.
A cogent, persuasive, and timely look at the dollar’s power.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-3030835187
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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